A Review of Global Policy Mechanisms Designed for Tropical Forests Conservation and Climate Risks Management

Deforestation and forest degradation of tropical forests are major global concerns due to their ecological, social, and economic roles. In the wake of climate change and its diverse global effects, fragmentation and degradation of tropical forests have jeopardized their ability to support livelihoods and regenerate climate regulating services. Concerted efforts by local, national, and international players, which are primarily scientific, technological, or economic, have borne minimal results in safeguarding these forests from destruction, necessitating a more integrated and inclusive approach. The Rio Earth Summit (1992) brought together world leaders to set targets and priorities on the global sustainability agenda and laid a strong foundation for international policy cooperation in the future. This study employed a systematic review of articles published between 1992 and 2020 to establish how various policy mechanisms have been developed and evolved to bridge forests and climate change discourse in tropical forests while highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. The initial search of peer-reviewed publications and gray literature yielded 2622 records, which were subjected to inclusion and exclusion criteria based on The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta Analyses guidelines, resulting in a final list of 65 records for in-depth qualitative analysis. The study establishes that the mechanisms in place have contributed mainly to more coordination and incentives to manage climate risks, primarily through tropical forests conservation. However, hurdles such as inadequate participation and involvement of the local and indigenous people, insufficient national and local policy frameworks and bureaucracies around emissions monitoring, measuring, reporting, and verification processes continue to slow tropical forest conservation. Thus, there is a need for more integrated, multilevel, and diverse stakeholder engagement to achieve the set global targets effectively.

A proposal for practical and effective biological corridors to connect protected areas in northwest Costa Rica

Habitat loss and increases in habitat isolation are causing animal population reductions and extirpations in forested areas of the world. This problem extends to protected areas, which, while often well-conserved, can be too small and isolated to maintain species that exist at low densities and require large contiguous areas of habitat (e.g. some large mammals). Costa Rica has been at the forefront of tropical forest conservation and a large proportion of the country’s land area is currently under some form of protection. One such area is the northwest portion of Costa Rica, which is an extremely biodiverse region with several noteworthy national and privately-owned protected areas. However, each protected area is an isolated island in a sea of deforestation. Within Costa Rica’s existing framework of biological corridors, we propose four sub-corridors as targets for restoration and full protection. These sub-corridors would link five major protected areas in northwest Costa Rica, with all of them linking to larger protected areas in the central portion of the country, while impacting a small number of people who reside within the corridors. After natural or active reforestation of the corridors, the result would be a contiguous protected area of 348,000 ha. The proposed sub-corridors would represent a 3.7% increase in protected area size in the region and only 0.2% of Costa Rica’s total land area. Using the jaguar (Panthera onca) as a model umbrella species, we estimated that each current isolated protected area could support between 8–104 individuals. Assuming lack of dispersal between protected areas (distance between each ranges from 8.1 to 24.9 km), these population sizes are unlikely to be viable in the long term. However, the combined protected areas, connected by biological sub-corridors, could support about 250 jaguars, a population size with a higher probability of surviving. Our study shows that focusing conservation efforts on a relatively small area of Costa Rica could create a large protected area derived from numerous small isolated preserves.

Land Transformation of Tropical Forest Conservation of Gashaka-Gumti National Park, Nigeria from 1987–2014

The study utilized Landsat imageries of 1987 (Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM)), 2000 (Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper plus (ETM+)) and 2014 (Landsat Operational Land Imager (OLI)) to examine land transformation in the Gashaka-Gumti National Park. The analysis indicated that dense forest which occupied 367,500 hectares at 62.2% of the total area of the park in 1987 has been converted into farmland and built-up area. Thus, the dense forest has reduced to 343, 300 hectares by the year 2000 and 107, 600 hectares in 2014 respectively. The result shows that the riparian forest decreased from 21,300 hectares in 1987 at 3.6% to16, 000 hectares in 2000 at 2.7% and further to11, 000 hectares (1.8%) by 2014. Savannah vegetation found to be concentrated in the northern part of the study area and occupied a total area of 81,260 hectares at 13% in 1987, reduced to 62,100 hectares at 10.5% in 2000 and increased to 183,800 hectares at 31.1% of the total area in 2014. The built-up area occupied a total area of 4,476 hectares at 7.5% in 1987. The built-up increased to 11,070 hectares at 1.81% in 2000 but decreased to10.930 hectares at1.85% in 2014 as a result of the news that the insurgents were shifting their base towards the park to hide from security forces and some of the people living within the area became afraid and deserted their houses and resettled in the nearby towns and villages that are outside the park.

No sense of ownership in weak participation: a forest conservation experiment in Tanzania

Sense of ownership is often advocated as an argument for local participation within the epistemic development and nature conservation communities. Stakeholder participation in initiating, designing or implementing institutions is claimed to establish a sense of ownership among the stakeholders and subsequently improve the intended outcomes of the given institution. Theoretical and empirical justifications of the hypothesis remain scarce. A better understanding of the effects of local participation can motivate more extensive and stronger participation of local stakeholders and improve institutional performance. This paper applies theories from psychology and behavioral economics to sense of ownership. The empirical investigation is a framed field experiment in the context of tropical forest conservation and payments for environmental services in Tanzania. The results lend little support to the hypothesis in this context. The participation treatment in the experiment is weak, and a possible explanation is that sense of ownership is sensitive to the participation form.